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Logic is no storyteller. The Maryland rapper has professed his love for Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan and favors lush, expansive soundscapes, but his cinematic ambitions are diminished by his vlogger perspective. Everybody, his third studio album is a feat of narrow vision. Covering race relations and identity and metaphysics, the album aims big but is utterly unrewarding, a dull haze of half-baked ideas and muddled intent. Centered around an encounter between a deity, played by astrophysicist and TV personality Neil deGrasse Tyson, and a mortal named Atom following his death in a car accident, Everybody follows Atom as he is endlessly reincarnated, slowly becoming everybody across the span of human history. It’s a trippy conceit but Logic fails to ever develop it. His verses attempt to ping between perspectives, but his characters are indistinguishable blurs, always inevitably folding back into Logic’s own underdeveloped story. This slippage could have illustrated the album’s themes of reincarnation and collective unity, but its shoddy execution reveals the limits of Logic’s vision.Simply put, Logic doesn’t have an eye for detail. His verses are pure information dumps, full of declarations and claims but rarely narratives. “I’m a dirty motherfucker, a waste of life, a waste of skin,” he says on “Confess,” summarizing a story he never told. “Television tellin’ my vision to get greedier!” he says on “Most Definitely,” citing the entire medium rather than a specific channel. When he does attempt a narrative, settings and scenarios are announced rather than evoked. “Imagine this child growing up and seeing the craziest shit, being apart of the craziest shit,” he says without elaboration on “Take It Back.” Imagine if he actually told that story. The Incredible True Story, Logic’s last album, lacked a compelling plot, but it at least didn’t confuse stage directions with action.

This album’s working title, “AfricAryaN” (a nod toward his biracial heritage), was discarded in the wake of a public backlash, but the original title’s hollow provocation is built into the album’s core. Logic frequently uses his mixed heritage to reject extremism, but he doesn’t even seem to grasp the difference between identity and prejudice. On “Everybody” he oscillates between questioning the idea of white privilege, rejecting racial identity outright, and claiming he contains the blood of slaves and masters. His confusion is forgivable, but it’s jarring that he resolves it by declaring everyone equal as if that were ever the question, as if his own discomfort encompasses the entirety of the issue. On “Take it Back” his heritage becomes the key to transcending identity, another unsolicited solution. “He always saw things from two sides. He always knew that the message that everybody was born equal regardless of race, religion, creed, and sexual orientation, he knew that because he saw that,” he says in blank verse, referring to himself. This is Logic’s idea of racial harmony: a black man whitesplaining equality.

Logic’s rapping is just as tortured, full of empty flow shifts and whiffed punchlines. “Street’s disciple, my rap’s a trifle/I shoot slurs from my brain just like Cobain,” he raps on “America.” “I wish I had motivation to get money/My rainy day would be sunny if I had a vision of currency falling above from the sky,” he raps on “Killing Spree.” Logic has never been an evocative rapper, but what he’s lacked in imagery he’s typically made up for with earnestness. Here he frequents a choppy stutter flow that mimics a record scratch. It’s stylish, but the sense of tedium does Logic little justice, especially when he gets outclassed by Black Thought and Chuck D on “America,” rappers capable of rapping well and emoting, not just one at a time. And this tedium is even more punishing if you’re a listener who’s familiar with the corners from which Logic sources all his parts: “America” is a schlocky imitation of Kanye’s “Fade” (it even has a Post Malone impression); “Most Definitely” lacks the assured breeziness of Mos Def’s “Umi Says;” “Killing Spree” bites Jay Rock’s “Vice City” but isn’t as infectiously seedy.

Ultimately, it’s just not clear what Logic is trying to do. Is he having an identity crisis? Is he affirming his identity? Is he having a crisis of faith? What is the nature of his faith? Is he upset about Spider-Man: Homecoming? You’d think these questions could be addressed in 71 minutes and 13 songs (many of them 6+ minutes) but Everybody is Logic’s least focused album yet. Instead of surveying human history, Logic vaguely explores his own anxieties, stargazing into the mirror. The beats are gorgeous and the ambition is clear, but what was supposed to be an album about everybody ended up being another album about Logic. And it doesn’t even tell his own story very well. Reincarnation is cruel.

According to rap fans, the only thing better than a classic album is a timeless album. If classic albums are albums that survive, outliving their contemporaries through tenacity and continued relevance, timeless albums are albums that transcend life itself, escaping mortality and ascending to a plane of eternal existence. Timeless albums don’t live or die: they are. Maryland rapper Logic has been aiming for timelessness ever since he christened himself “Young Sinatra.” On The Incredible True Story he finally achieves timelessness, but that isn’t a compliment.The album is framed as a sci-fi adventure in which two space travelers, voiced by Steve Blum and Kevin Randolph, travel to a potentially habitable planet called Paradise. Raised in a space colony, the two travelers have no memory of Earth, which has been destroyed: they are so far removed from it that the sky is simply a concept to them. The only contact they have with Earth is The Catalog, a collection of music and other media that keeps them connected to their lost roots despite only 5 million humans being left in the universe. Logic’s music is apart of that catalog and the two travelers spend their journey listening to him. He is literally the soundtrack to humanity’s salvation.

This grandiose self-mythologizing isn’t supported by the music. Although Logic has graduated from the generic earnestness of his previous work, he’s still plagued by his inability to evoke compelling imagery. Throughout the album he alludes to the anxieties and difficulties in his life and career, but these references are barely even sketches. On “Never Been” he speaks of becoming more mature and knowledgeable and struggling every day, but these reflections don’t seem to be tethered to any concrete experience. His verses are just strings of aphorisms, unearned righteousness masquerading as maturation. This lack of imagery wouldn’t be a problem if Logic was more emotionally flexible or at least more imaginative, but he is frequently neither. Though the album is framed – conceptually and sonically – as a space adventure and it even features Steve Blum, the voice behind one of sci-fi’s best series about space (Cowboy Bebop), Logic never quite digs into the metaphorical potential of his theme. Not only is the “incredible story” completely uneventful (they literally just fly to a planet: there are no computer system malfunctions, crashes, comets, evil computers, pit stops, supernovas, etc.), but Logic himself sticks to incredibly straightforward lyrics. “I’m on an interstellar mission” he raps on “Innermission.” “In a spaceship, I’m in another system” he raps on “Fade Away.” Part of the reason Logic seems to be limited in his lyricism is his overwhelming emphasis on flow. Though he no longer actively cloys to be respected as a lyricist – i.e., he’s eased up on the corny punchlines – the showiness of his flow shows that he still yearns for that recognition. He frequently raps at high speeds for no apparent reason, bludgeoning tracks with a grating cadence that is on beat but often has no engagement with the instrumentals. On “Fade Away” he blitzes through cheerful synths, warm hums, and clicking percussion. On “Stainless” he blazes through a symphonic sample and snappy snares. There’s nothing wrong with rapping fast, but Logic uses his flow bluntly rather than nimbly, clobbering through songs rather than waltzing.

There are a few moments where Logic does appear to be more tactical with his flow. “City of Stars” features him trying out auto-tune and patiently crooning over a slow-burning, crinkling beat. As he declares the end of a wearying love, you can feel the warmth in his voice, the lingering hurt despite his chest-thumping dismissal. “This ain’t a love song,” he insists, convincing himself more than his former lover. “I Am the Greatest” also features a deviation from his typical over-flowing, but it’s a road that’s already been paved. Logic sounds exactly like Drake circa 2015 on this track, his slow and strained delivery sounding more imitative than indignant.

In the end, “The Incredible True Story” shows Logic’s vision of hip-hop to be thoroughly, exhaustingly simple. For him, hip-hop is just rapping: flair, technique, finesse, drama, tension, and even passion are afterthoughts, excesses. Despite regularly citing and imitating his pantheon of idols – Drake, A Tribe Called Quest, Tupac, Quentin Tarantino – Logic consistently comes across as another deluded stargazer mistaking an orbit for a trajectory. If Logic can’t expand his narrow vision on an album that is literally about traversing the cosmos, he likely has little else to offer. ”The Incredible True Story” is a timeless album through and through: unvarying, static, stable. It can endure for eons because it makes no effort do anything more.